


The Way the Cookie Crumbles

by autumnlouise



Series: Baby, It's Cold Outside [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Baby It's Cold Outside, F/M, Sherlolly - Freeform, Warstan Fluff, molly can't cook, sherlolly fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 06:41:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12906312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autumnlouise/pseuds/autumnlouise
Summary: Sherlock discovers a hidden talent, and Molly realizes that she is a much better pathologist than a chef.





	The Way the Cookie Crumbles

After a particularly grueling case, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were not amused when they returned to 221B Baker Street and found the entire flat filled with smoke. The fire alarms were screeching, the whole place smelled like a campfire gone wrong, and in the background of it all was the sound of women screaming and laughing at the same time.

Sherlock and John exchanged a very confused, very alarmed glance.

“What the  _ hell  _ is going on?” John shouted, covering his nose and mouth while charging into the smoke. Sherlock followed, heading towards what must have been the source- the kitchen.  _ Why _ did it sound like bloody murder in the kitchen? He hadn’t left any of his experiments on the bunsen burners before going out on the case, and he certainly hadn’t been using the fireplace. No one had lit any candles before they’d left… Molly and Mary and Mrs. Hudson had been lounging in the living room, but nothing they’d been doing was especially flammable…

_ Molly. _ Oh, God, Molly. His stomach lurched. From the sound of it, she was still inside the house, which could burst into flames at any second. She was in danger- all of them were. A thousand possibilities ran through his mind. Arson? Murder? If Molly and Mary were harmed because someone was trying to hurt Sherlock, he wasn’t sure he could forgive himself. Pushing past John, he flew up the stairs.

Sherlock found an answer as soon as he barged into the kitchen: through the smoke, he could see Molly Hooper and Mary Watson standing around a burning oven, awkwardly trying to fan the smoke away. Relief flooded through him at the sight of the two of them alive and unharmed. It was just a simple kitchen fire- if everyone stopped panicking, they could take care of this easily and have the whole matter fixed. At the sound of their pounding footsteps, the girls looked up. 

“What is–” Sherlock began to say, but was interrupted by a particularly loud screech of the fire alarm and Mary’s equally shrill voice. Everything turned chaotic in the span of a few seconds. 

“John! Damn it, get the fire extinguisher!”

“We don’t have one!” John yelled back in response, wildly looking around for  _ something _ to put the fire out. All of them were clearly beginning to panic. 

“Bloody  _ idiots,  _ the pair of you!” Mary looked like she wanted to punch him. 

Molly, who had been covering her ears thus far, shouted, “Stop yelling, it’s not helping!” 

John threw his arms up in frustration. “ _ I’m _ not the one who’s been burning down the flat-”

Dear Lord. How could they expect to fix  _ anything _ through all of this bickering? Panicking and arguing were going to do nothing to help the situation and would only waste the precious time they had to control the fire. Before the idiots could make things any worse, Sherlock lunged forward and kicked the oven door shut, trapping the fire firmly  _ inside _ the appliance. 

“SHUT UP!” he bellowed in his deepest, angriest baritone. The flat fell silent except for the loud shrieking of the alarms. Bloody hell, that noise was starting to get on his nerves. He put his hands to his temples and huffed out a breath. “All of you, just  _ shut up! _ John, Mary, stop having a domestic in my kitchen and go open the bloody windows. Molly, turn off the oven and the smoke alarms and stop looking like a deer in the headlights. Where is Mrs. Hudson?!” 

“At the grocer’s,” Molly told him, voice shaking. Good, his landlady was safe, and in a few moments, the rest of them would be, too. When Molly moved to switch off the oven, Sherlock noticed that she began to fold in on herself. Her face was a bright red- not just from the heat of the fire, Sherlock noticed, but from embarrassment as well. Sherlock reached to tap her on the shoulder– but before he could, she turned away and slipped out of the kitchen, presumably to turn off the smoke detectors.

A few seconds later, the house was silent save for John and Mary’s quiet, continued bickering in the living room. As Sherlock had predicted, once the fire was cut off from an oxygen supply and a continued source of heat, it quickly died out. All that remained was a baking sheet, coated with black ash and small lumps of what looked to be charred dough of some sort. Sherlock gingerly removed it from the oven and dumped it in the sink. John came to re-join the detective, looking for an escape from the argument  _ he  _ had started; the girls, on the other hand, peeked into the kitchen, ascertaining whether or not they could re-enter the scene of the crime.

“What in  _ God’s name _ were you  _ doing? _ ” he demanded, trying to figure out how a recipe could have gone so wrong. 

Mary and Molly looked at each other from their place in the doorway, their expressions a combination of ashamed and trying hard not to laugh. “Baking. Baking Christmas cookies.”

“Mary forgot the eggs,” Molly put in with a nervous giggle.

“ _ She’s _ the one who set the oven to 200 instead of 175!” The blonde accused. But the remarks were nothing more than teasing, as both of them dissolved into relieved, anxious laughter a second later. 

John put a hand to his temples. “Oh my God.”

Sherlock made a mental note to never let neither his girlfriend nor John’s wife near any sort of kitchen appliance unsupervised again. What had given them the hare-brained idea anyways?

Molly crossed her arms. “We were just trying to be  _ festive. _ ” 

“Yeah, and it’s not like you lot could do any better.” Mary leered, still giggling but firmly backing her friend. John and Sherlock looked at each other; one wore the expression of a man wary of his wife, the other of a detective who never backed down from a challenge.

Sherlock drawled, “Yes, we could.”

“No, we couldn’t, Sherlock.” John said through gritted teeth. He clearly didn’t want to incite any sort of contest that could end up with him on the losing side. But John was forgetting that, even though the fairer sex was stereotypically supposed to be better at kitchen work, they had an advantage. John had made the thing with the peas, once, and that had turned out well. And Sherlock had a master’s degree in chemistry.

“ _ Yes, _ we  _ could. _ ” he insisted. “John, you forget that I am a chemist. The measuring and mixing of chemistry and cooking are very nearly the same. How hard can it be?”

As it turned out, not very. 

Just as usual, Sherlock had been right. The actions required of cooking were almost exactly like that of chemistry, just on a larger scale. It was not at all difficult to correctly assemble the ingredients needed to mix the dough, and making it into little lumps and putting it in the oven was the simplest part of the whole task. How had Molly and Mary managed to muck it up so badly? Thirty minutes later, the kitchen smelled of ginger rather than smoke, and a warm batch of ginger cookies, fresh out of the (singed) oven were piled on a plate. 

Mary looked incredulous, but Molly clapped her hands in amusement. “Oh, they’re wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Let’s decorate them!”

Sherlock found the idea of decorating Christmas cookies rather incredulous. Why ruin a perfectly good piece of food with sprinkles and candies that tasted like processed sugar? But the smile on Molly’s face was so bright that Sherlock didn’t have the heart to protest. So he shoved away any misgivings and dumped a load of red-and-green sprinkles on the cookies to make his friends happy. Mary snapped a picture of him and Molly that Sherlock fervently hoped would not end up on FaceSpace, or whatever blasted social media network people were using these days. 

But despite the batch of warm cookies and the fun of decorating, Molly still seemed distant. And despite being the world’s only consulting detective and an expert at deduction, he could not, for the life of him, figure out why.

“Are you alright?” he murmured, leaning over her shoulder as she arranged white chocolate chips into the pattern of a snowman. He had to admit, the decorating was a bit charming when Molly did it. 

“Fine.” she said tightly, and everything from her body language to the tone of her voice told Sherlock that she was lying. This was the part where he was supposed to either leave it alone, or press further. Sometimes he had a hard time figuring out when to do which, but after much trial-and-error, he figured that it was best to leave her alone during the worst days of her menstrual cycle or if she had had a particularly bad day at Barts. This was neither one of those situations, so he cautiously probed further. 

“Was it something I said?” he guessed, as his comments and deductions were the most common reason for his friends being upset with him.

Molly sighed. She turned around to face him, abandoning her cookie in the process. “I just feel bad that I upset you.” she admitted. “The baking was my idea, and then I went ahead and ruined things and almost caught the house on fire…”

“You thought I was  _ angry _ at you?” Sherlock was bewildered. Why in the world would he be upset with her for something that was clearly an accident? She certainly hadn’t had the intention of reducing his kitchen to ashes. Yes, he was quite confused at how one could botch a recipe  _ that _ badly, but he wasn’t angry with Molly or Mary in the least bit. 

Molly looked down. “Well, it certainly sounded like it.”

_ Oh. _ The yelling. That. He supposed he could have solved the problem a bit differently, but hindsight was 20/20. Sherlock put his hand under Molly’s chin, tipping her head up towards his. As he spoke, he looked straight into her lovely brown eyes. “Molly, I was in no way upset with you. I was simply  _ alarmed _ to return home and find the flat filled with smoke, with you inside, nonetheless. I assumed the worst… I was just worried for your safety, and it was that anxiety that caused me to speak so horribly earlier. Please, forgive me.”

Molly wrapped her arms around the detective and leaned into his chest. “I’m sorry for worrying you.”

He kissed the top of her head. “You did not even need to ask for forgiveness. Just stay away from electric cooking appliances in the near-future, please?”

She agreed, and they sealed the deal with a quick but passionate kiss on the lips. Molly stood on her toes to reach Sherlock, and the detective had his hands in her hair, and he was so incredibly grateful that she was  _ safe _ . 

“Oi!” John yelled, and the kiss was broken apart thanks to two lovely cookies pelted at them by none other than Mr. and Mrs. Watson. “There are other people in the  _ room _ , mate.”

Sherlock opened his mouth to say something particularly nasty in response. But before he could fire something back at John, Molly had shoved the cookie she’d been decorating into his mouth, laughing all the while. 

At that very moment, Mrs. Hudson came bumbling up the steps, arms full of bags from the grocer's. When she came into the kitchen to find a rather scorched cookie pan, the Watsons and Molly chuckling, and Sherlock with his mouth full of baked goods, she raised an eyebrow and quipped, “Oh… have I missed something?”

The foursome dissolved into laughter. Oh, she didn’t know the least of it.


End file.
